‘Soundings’ Features Art With Audio Elements

Soundings: A Contemporary Score, a survey of sound art, opens at the Museum of Modern Art on Saturday. Tristan Perich’s “Microtonal Wall” is a 25-foot panel with 1,500 tiny speakers, each at different pitch.

Suzanne DeChillo / The New York Times

By HOLLAND COTTER

August 8, 2013

Three summers ago, the Museum of Modern Art installed a 1961 sound art work by Yoko Ono in its atrium. It was called “Voice Piece for Soprano — Scream 1. against the wind 2. against the wall 3. against the sky.” It consisted of a live standing microphone and some extremely loud amplifiers. Anyone passing through the atrium was invited to stand in front of the mike and follow the instructions in the title: that is, scream.

Countless visitors, including many kids and antic-minded adults, gleefully complied. But where Ms. Ono could turn a scream into a coloratura aria, the average amateur participant just gave an explosive shriek and scampered away. The piece stayed in place for months. It turned the museum into a sonic hell. MoMA habitués, including guards, couldn’t wait for it to go away.

Still, it had its merits. It was, for one thing, a very un-MoMA phenomenon: unpredictable, uncontrolled, anarchic, all that that institution is not. It also did what sound art was historically meant to do: to give sound — variously referred to as noise, or music or silence — the assertive presence of any other art medium, make it fill space, claim attention and time.

In recent years, attention has been slight. The much-maligned 2002 Whitney Biennial included a substantial amount of sound art, by the likes of Maryanne Amacher and Stephen Vitiello. But like many of that show’s innovations, this one sailed straight over the heads of critics and didn’t get much follow-up.

Now, more than a decade later, MoMA is picking up the slack with a survey show of new art called “Soundings: A Contemporary Score,” which opens Saturday. As if in reaction to Ms. Ono’s eruptive brashness, it is low key to the point of timidity. And formally speaking, much of it isn’t sound art in any pure sense. It’s sculpture, film, installation and work on paper with audio components.

Throughout the 20th century, sound was frontier terrain, staked out by crazies and visionaries: pro-violence Futurists, war-addled Dadaists and out-there beings like Antonin Artaud. The composer John Cage and his Fluxus successors were part of sound art’s gentler, though no less radical side. And that’s the side, now neatly landscaped, that “Soundings” is on.

The simple fact that the show looks like a normal, neat, stuff-on-the-walls-and-floors MoMA fare says a lot. Two artists are represented only by drawings. Marco Fusinato’s are based on the printed pages of a score by the composer Iannis Xenakis (1922-2001). On each page, Mr. Fusinato has drawn hundreds of ink lines tying all the notes to a single central point. Were the piece played the way the score looks, it would sound like a detonation.

The large-format drawings on paper by Christine Sun Kim are also scores, but look expressive and personal, even diaristic. Ms. Kim has been deaf since birth, and her approach to sound is highly conceptual. Basically, she’s creating the idea of it, visually, in terms most useful to her: American Sign Language, written English, physical gesture.

Both artists present sound in abstract form, as notion. The work of a third artist, Carsten Nicolai, incorporates sound that’s actual but inaudible. Using a tanklike container, he directs low-frequency sound waves onto the surface of a pool of water and, with mirrors, projects the patterns the waves create onto a display screen. The screen is the first thing you see when you enter the galleries. You could easily take it for an abstract painting with the shakes. Only when you circle around, do you see that it’s really an elaborate, overly ingenious kinetic sculpture.

The show has more busy sculpture. One by the American composer Richard Garet is an ensemble of old stereo speakers, a spinning turntable, a microphone and a glass marble, joined to produce a sound like a skipping record. A concoction of buzzes and flashes by the British artist Haroon Mirza is notable mostly for serving as a frame for one of MoMA’s Mondrian paintings, which looks like a fancy acoustic panel in this context.

And the Rube Goldberg bug carries over into an installation by the Scottish artist and filmmaker Luke Fowler and the Japanese composer Toshiya Tsunoda that includes electric fans, landscape images projected on a loose cloth, stretched piano wires and a dollop of Cagean chance. If the cloth, blown by the fans, touches the wires, we get a sound, a dull drone. The piece is very pretty to see, but to hear, not much.

Both of the show’s videos are good. For the 2011 “Music While We Work,” the Taiwanese artist Hong-Kai Wang recruited retired sugar factory workers to return to their former plant, record its ambient sounds and create a score from them. As we watch them attentively holding microphones at assembly lines and loading platforms, we’re hearing what they are conscientiously rehearing: the soundtrack of their lives.

The Danish artist Jacob Kirkegaard also recorded and filmed specific environments, four public buildings in Chernobyl, abandoned after the 1986 nuclear disaster. Unlike Ms. Wang, he manipulates his data by recording and rerecording it multiple times, until sounds and images become dense, grainy and heavy. Interiors seem to be slowly leaking out of darkness into visibility; sounds swell from near-silence to a carillon clamor.

Bells — church bells, stock exchange bells, bicycle bells, all taped in Manhattan — are the substance of a charming timed sound installation by Mr. Vitiello in MoMA’s sculpture garden. (One bell goes off every minute; they all go off on the hour.) It’s one of several works that extended the exhibition — organized by Barbara London, an associate curator in the department of media and performance art, and Leora Morinis, a curatorial assistant — into other parts of the museum.

Most of the outlying things are physically plain and audio-intensive. In a sweet, slight piece by Florian Hecker, three discretely placed speakers carry on an electronic conversation between two floors of the museum. Tristan Perich’s “Microtonal Wall,” a 25-foot-long panel pieced together from 1,500 tiny speakers, each tuned to a different pitch, is a kind of monumental musical instrument. To walk past it is to feel the sensation of a xylophone playing in your head.

Susan Philipsz’s “Study for Strings,” inside the galleries, is the closest thing to conventional music, and one of the show’s strong entries. It’s a recording of only the viola and cello parts, and their pauses, from a string orchestra composition written in 1943 by Pavel Haas in a German concentration camp. A performance by prisoners of the full, 24-part piece was filmed for Nazi propaganda purposes, after which the musicians, including Haas, were killed.

Clearly, sound, all but dematerialized, can be extremely powerful. Here’s proof. And there’s more in Jana Winderen’s “Ultrafield,” a classic “field recording” piece for which the artist taped sounds made by bats, deepwater fish and insects pitched beyond human hearing. Converted to the minimal audibility, the whirs, ticks and crackles of invisible beings turn a dark gallery into a kind of cosmic acoustic device.

Finally, one piece, Camille Norment’s “Triplight,” radiates that wondrous thing, the music of silence. The hardware involved is bare-bones: a 1955 standing microphone, of a kind once regularly used by jazz, blues and pop singers. In this one, though, the amplification unit has been replaced by a small light that flickers and brightens as if responding to a singer’s breath and voice.

It’s tempting to see Ms. Norment’s mute mike as a counterweight to Ms. Ono’s loud one. And a few more comparisons, probing the parameters of an understudied discipline, might have given some punch to a show that, like too many others at MoMA these days, tames unruly impulses in art, past and present, when it should be egging them on. There’s still a major sound art exhibition waiting to be done, and it will be, but not here.